AOL Design System 2025 — A complete redesign and system rebuild of AOL’s web experience. AOL had design artifacts, but no shared system language — resulting in slow delivery, inconsistent QA, and repeated rework between design and engineering. I rebuilt the system to unify design, PM, and engineering under one scalable framework, cutting delivery time by over 50%.
My goal was to transform non-systemized design work into a unified, scalable design system that accelerated collaboration across design, PM, and engineering. In parallel, I led visual unification and contributed to data-informed layout redesigns that improved overall product consistency and performance.
I made the call to reduce visual flexibility in favor of enforceable tokens — a decision that initially met resistance from designers but ultimately enabled reliable handoff and scale.
Foundation Setup
From tokens to interfaces
Built semantic color and interaction tokens powering 100+ reusable components.
Ingestion-ready design handoff guideline
Developed guidelines for designers to create ingestion-ready design handoff files.
Design-to-code inspection + token checks
Reduced QA review cycles by 70% through automated token-based validation.
System adoption & ops
Defined DS Ops rhythm and governance model, ensuring long-term scalability and adoption.
